Girls Spinning at the Gate

By the time this was painted, around 1885, Romania was a very new country, independent from the Ottomans only a few years and a kingdom since 1881. Grigorescu, one of the founders of its modern painting, had trained in France at Barbizon among artists who worked outdoors in the fields, and he brought that habit home to paint his own country's villages. Two young women in folk dress sit by a wooden gate, spinning wool. It is an ordinary chore, and he treats it plainly. What he chases instead is the light, the strong summer sun flooding the lane and the deep green of the trees crowding in behind the fence.